Echo
by smiles1777
Summary: Hibari/Haru. Haru ponders time and Hibari fights it every step of the way.


**Author's Notes:** Some of the time theories were kindly borrowed from _Einstein's Dreams_. Written for khrfest at LJ. Prompt was Hibari/Haru - time; "and you'll challenge fate itself?" Beta'd by the lovely hope_assassin at LJ. Thank you darling. Dedicated to the magnificent alcyonev at LJ, 'cause it's her prompt.

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**Echo**

_(Your eyes blink open, assaulted by a familiar brilliant and sharp blue sky. The sun is warm on your skin, just like it always is. You know she's kneeling next to you, her eyes curious and head tilted in confusion._

_This is the seven-hundred and fifty-sixth time.)_

If there was one thing Haru was certain of (besides her confidence in her sewing skills, love for cake, and the fact that Tsuna-san would be her husband), it was that time was fixed. She lived in the present and no matter how many years passed, it would always be the present. The past may have lingered like a sweet echo in her mind, and the future may have been an exciting possibility, but the present was the only tangible entity. Time flowed through a single point like a ticker tape. It was nothing the instant before it occurred and ceased to exist the millisecond it passed. This was something she had been taught and knew.

Thus it was understandable that she would be confused when she opened her eyes and found herself not in bed like she should be, but kneeling on the roof of Namimori Middle School. With Tsuna-san's friend Hibari. If she did not know better (which she did), she would have thought the ticker tape skipped. She wondered (hypothetically, of course) if the morning was lost forever or if she would live it some undetermined time in the future.

"Hahi?" She leaned forward to peer more closely at the boy as he blinked his eyes open. She chewed her bottom lip nervously and prayed frantically in her head that he didn't wake up because of her. Tsuna-san had warned her to never wake Hibari.

Hibari sat up languidly, stifling a yawn. His hair whipped around fervently in the wind and she caught herself staring.

He shifted his sharp grey eyes in her direction. Something flashed in his eyes too quick for her to register but with a familiarity she recognized. His lips moved slightly, an expression of some emotion she could not place – arrogance, boredom, amusement, disappointment?

He left the roof without a word while she sat frozen in confusion, her mind jumbled with time and memories and the familiarity of his expression. She found herself wondering about a boy named Hibari Kyouya, the sun warm on her skin and wind cool in her breath.

_(And just like that, you are twenty-five years old with memories of her that you never lived.)_

Amidst the chaos and uncertainty of a world ten years later, Haru re-evaluated her theory of time. She did not want to believe it at first, but reality was heavy and insistent, prodding her until her mind was bruised and will was submissive. She came to the conclusion that time was linear. It was the people who moved through it, the dynamic entity breathing life into a set succession of places and dates. While for the most part everyone traveled through time as a sequence of events, it was possible to jump through borders, and end up ten years later.

She frowned, stirring the stew she cooked idly as the thought formulated and solidified in her mind. "This is all very confusing," she muttered to herself and sighed.

"You already know."

She turned around sharply at the deep voice and almost dropped her ladle when she found Hibari leaning against the doorframe, his brow lowered and eyes sharp (so sharp, she could almost feel them pierce straight through her).

"H-hahi? Hibari-san?"

He didn't respond but pushed himself off the doorframe, his long legs carrying him to the oven where her stew simmered. She held her ladle with both hands pulled close to her chest, inching back unconsciously until she hit the hard edge of the stove. He closed in slowly, dark hair falling into sharp eyes that never left her face, as if searching or daring or prompting her for something she did not know she possessed. His scent surrounded and trapped her (spice and musk and a hint of mint), she felt his arms reach past her, boxing her in against his tall, large body and the stove.

She closed her eyes and pushed the ladle into his chest. "H-HARU ONLY LIKES TSUNA-SAN!" she stuttered out.

She heard a grunt of annoyance before his presence left her personal bubble. She peeked one eye open cautiously and found him glaring at her. "Hahi?"

He continued to glare for a moment before he curtly informed her, "The rice is burnt."

She frowned and peered at the stove, afraid to take her eyes off him in case he tried something weird again. "Haru doesn't think – HAHI? THE RICE IS BURNING!" She quickly pushed the pot off the element, bemoaning the wasted food as she examined the damage.

He left before she could properly thank him for the warning.

She found he liked to do that. Engage her until she was flushed and scattered, only to leave her heaving and clutching at thin air. She became accustomed to the expanse of his back walking away from her. He knew her every quirk and habit. All her reactions and responses were like a dance he choreographed himself. She wondered if they were close in this era, ten years later. Perhaps that would explain his ability to predict her so thoroughly.

She lowered her brow one evening as she washed the dishes, Lambo and I-pin playing loudly around the kitchen while Tsuna and the gang tried to reel them in. Kyoko said something to her, but she did not respond, too preoccupied to register her friend's conversation. There was the strangest familiarity about Hibari that she could not place, like _déjà vu_ that she knew she had never lived through.

She stared down at her hands as if they held the answers to her questions. Submerged in the soapy water were secrets and truths hidden in bubbles and fading warmth. She moved her fingers slightly, watching the ripples peel out and slosh against the edge of the sink, hoping to disrupt those pockets of knowledge. Only, the water was just water, and flowed around her hands and soaked into her skin, lending nothing in the way of explanations.

_(You fight it every step of the way. Your every cell, every hair, every molecule that makes up the blue liquid in your veins burns with resentment. Boxed in, dictated, unable to follow your own will. You fight until you taste iron in your mouth, and then you fight even more._

_Still you find her under and over and all around you. Still her mouth settles on your lips, still her hands curve down your waist. Still you feel her breath in your lungs and you feel her break under your arms, delicate and fragile yet powerful enough to destroy you in centuries repeated. You wonder if your resistance is what pushed you here with her._

_Still. You never stop fighting.)_

Haru majored in physics, determined to study time and figure out the answers that eluded her. She wanted to know what happened to the missing pieces of her life, pieces she remembered but somehow felt she never lived. She went through dozens of theories (perhaps time was backward. She lived through it in reverse order, forgetting the future and living the past), each more extravagant than the last (maybe time was not constant, but sometimes went quickly enough to bring her to the future, and slow enough to reverse her back to the past). Her professors encouraged her to explore her theories, she gained recognition among the academics of her university and beyond. She was a _scientist_ and yet _he_ refused to acknowledge her work.

She did not notice when Hibari's opinion began to mean anything to her. She did not notice when they became so intimate, though she suspected it had something to do with how intimacy seemed to be their default. He knew her and she knew him, with no pretence or need for trivial chit-chat. It was not until they moved in together that Haru even realized they had become lovers. They had felt more like an accepted fact that no one ever thought about, like gravity or the color of the sky.

She curled toward him on their futon, legs entangled and sticky-hot under the mountain of blankets. She kept her hands to herself, having learnt long ago he reacted poorly to her fingertips but strangely accepted the skin of her nose pressed into his neck. She could tell he was awake though he lay absolutely still.

"I think time is like a river," she started quietly, knowing he would not respond. He would listen to everything she had in her mind to say, but he never acknowledged time. "Yeah, a river," she continued, confirming her new thoughts to herself. "It flows and twists and turns."

She rolled onto her back and poked her hands out of the covers, tapping her fingers randomly. "That's why sometimes it goes so quickly. And sometimes it's so slow."

Hibari remained quiet but shifted his shoulders to angle himself closer to her.

"You think I'm wrong." She hummed and smiled wryly, a dozen emotions transcending into one. "Sometimes the flow goes backwards. Sometimes it hits a waterfall and we jump into the future." She reached her arms above her head. "I don't think we ever get those jumps back, you know. Kind of sad, isn't it?"

He did not respond, but she was not surprised.

She reached a hand to his hair but let her fingers hover, still but for the minute quiver back and forth so that they never really went back to where they started. "The water is poison." She frowned, unhappy with her word choice. "No, that's not it."

He sat up slowly, the covers pooling around his waist. She jerked her hand back to her chest, her eyes wide and focused solely on his silhouette made from tricks of moonlight and the blinds on the window. She did not know what she expected, but the words out of his mouth were not the ones rehearsed somewhere unknown and locked in her memories.

"The water is amnesia."

"Hahi?" She sat up and smiled at him, something akin to joy twinkling in her eyes and the corners of her mouth. "I like that."

She took his hand in hers. He made a noise in the back of his throat but did not remove his hand. "It's wrong," he told her.

She sighed and rested her head on his cold shoulder. "You never like any of my theories."

"You are never right."

She puffed her cheeks and blew out a loud raspberry on his pale skin. "I'll get it right one day. Just you wait."

"You won't."

"I WILL!"

"You would have done it by now."

"Nothing will stop me," she reassures him. "I'll discover the truth."

She felt him laugh silently and closed her eyes, absorbing the rare occurrence into her very being, breathing it inside with slow inhalations.

"And you'll challenge fate itself?" His question was dark and low and so full of sincere curiosity that it shocked her for a moment (or maybe it was an eternity or some measure of time between the two).

"Mm." Her arms wrapped around his waist and pulled him back down to the bed. She climbed over his prone body until she settled onto his chest, lips pressing softly against the sharp edge of his chin. "Haru makes her own fate."

_(Time is circular. It repeats exactly the same as the previous occurrence. The same time skips, the same incomplete events. There are blocks of your life you have never lived but somehow a memory of them exists (you have never felt the first time she kissed you, that shy touch of lips before she quickly ran off, Hibird trailing behind her). You are trapped in a loop, an unalterable loop that skips and stutters but always brings you through the same series of events. You have fought against it, tried to change your decisions, but fate is inescapable. Fate is not some deity or will of the universe, but it is ingrained in every gene and thought and experience you've ever had. You can never avoid your fate because it embodies all that you are._

_You do not know why you are the only one to recognize time's cycle. Perhaps the reason lies in your refusal to accept any theory not your own. Or maybe it's fate._

_She recognizes it, deep inside, hidden beneath layers of false beliefs and naïve assumptions. You know if she could just make the connection, you would both break free from the cycle. You do not know whether you would continue on or if time would cease altogether, nor do you care. It will not happen. She will not recognize it, because deep inside, she has willed this fate into reality._

_There is inevitability in her and in you. She will always be the one stealing your freedom and saving your sanity. You will always be the one taunting her dimensions of time and space and reason. You feel everything for her – hate, love, indifference. You've felt it all, you've lived it all, and you will again, forever. Your hell is your heaven as she echoes through your existence, spiralling until you cannot tell where it began._

_Your eyes blink open to a brilliant and sharp blue sky and you are born anew.)_

If there was one thing she was certain of, it was that time was fixed.

_(This is the seven-hundred and fifty-seventh time.)_


End file.
